They please, are pleased; they give to get esteem, It gives their follies also room to rise; For praise too dearly loved, or warmly sought, Goldsmith's Traveller. Paris differs from London in some important respects. The manner in which land is owned in France does not give to one class of Frenchmen those large incomes which are enjoyed in England, consequently Paris does not derive from the provinces such an expenditure as London does from England. But Paris being a place of much greater gaiety and fashion, is more resorted to by the wealthy and extravagant of other countries. There appears less social depravity in Paris than in London. The rich among the French are neither so rich, nor are the poor so poor, as in London. Paris is, in proportion to its population, a more productive city than London. Some manufactures are carried on pretty extensively in Paris. The workpeople are not so well paid as in similar trades in England, but they do not consume as much food, nor do they perform as much work. My impression is, that the cost of any given article is nearly as much in Paris as in England, the inequality in wages being met by a similar diminution in the quantity of work. The French workmen rarely eat more than twice a day, while English workmen will eat four times a day. This brings me to the question under consideration, that of food. Paris has a population of over one million of persons, all of whom require their daily food. Bread, meat, vegetables, must all be supplied in sufficient quantities for their consumption. In looking to the question, I may glance aside to compare the relative ratio of population of a few of the capitals of Europe to the population of the kingdoms which they represent. Next to London, Brussels is larger in proportion than any of the cities I enumerate at foot.* I cannot regard the growth of cities as an advantage to a country, they are rather a drain upon her resources. The supply of grain for Paris may be furnished by the four departments in immediate contiguity thereto. The area under wheat in these departments was, in 1849, as follows: The produce of cereals from these departments, after deducting one-sixth for seed, is about 14,786,400 hectolitres, or sufficient for 2,370,000 persons. The population of Paris in 1861 was 1,174,000. These four departments had, therefore, grown sufficient grain for a population double that of Paris. The consumption of meat in Paris has been increasing. In 1841, the average consumption was sixty-one and a quarter kilomètres per head, in 1861 it had increased to sixty-two and a half kilomètres per head. That of London was estimated at seventy-eight kilomètres, of Munich at one hundred and twelve, of Berlin at fifty-four, and of Madrid at forty-seven. Paris stands third upon the list. My route from Paris lay nearly due south, and I passed from a colder to a warmer climate, from a state of agriculture similar to that of England, to one altogether different in almost all essentials. Many writers upon the climate and products of France have followed the divisions made by a celebrated English writer, Arthur Young, who travelled in France in the years 1787, 1788, 1789; he wrote: France admits of a division into three capital parts: 1, of vines; 2, of maize; 3, of olives: which plants will give three districts: 1, the northern, where vines are not planted; 2, the central, in which maize is not planted; 3, the south, in which olives, mulberries, vines, and maize are found. The limit, or boundary line, between vines and no vines, he placed at lat. 49. He remarks, "The proportion of poor land in England to the total of the kingdom is greater than the similar proportion in France. In England the average produce of wheat and rye (nineteen-twentieths of the former) is twenty-four bushels, which form a vast superiority to eighteen, the produce of France, amounting to twelve for one of the seed, instead of five to one. But eighteen bushels of wheat and rye and miserable spring corn afford as high a rent in France as twentyfour in England, with the addition of our excellent spring corn. This forms a striking contrast, and leads to the explanation of the difference.' On my journey from Paris to Lyons I travelled in an almost direct line-316 miles-and in its course we passed one city (Dijon) of 33,000 inhabitants, and another (Macon) of 16,000. All the rest were smaller. Where in England could such a journey be taken with such a result? The civic population of Great Britain forms a larger proportion of the aggregate population than was ever known in the world. A comparison of the principal countries shows that the rural and civic portions were divided in proportions varying from thirty-five per cent. of the former in Scotland to eighty-nine per cent. in Russia.* The civic population are non-producers; all the articles they consume must be grown in the country and carried to the towns, and the manure is in most cases lost. This especially takes place where the towns are on the seaboard. When they are inland, the animal secretions can be spread over a circle of which the town is the centre, and so much waste does not occur. The countries in which the civic population exceeds the rural are are not producing sufficient food for the consumption of the people. They import it from other countries. Each person *Civic and Rural Population of some Nations. consumes about a quarter of corn per annum. The number of British who are supported by foreign supplies is about equal to the number of quarters of grain imported. This proportion has been gradually increasing; the imports of foreign grain have become larger and larger, the production of home-grown grain smaller and smaller. The population of the United Kingdom, the imports of foreign grain, and the number of the people dependent on her own agriculture, are illustrative of vast changes : The decrease in the produce of British agriculture is very suggestive. France, in favourable seasons, produces sufficient grain, or nearly sufficient, for her own consumption. In 1849 she exported a surplus, but from 1837 to 1846 the average imports into France were less than 500,000 qrs. per annum. Out of a civic population of 10,089,217 in France only 2,210,067 were in cities of over 50,000 inhabitants; thus showing less concentration of the civic population than exists in England. Complaints have come from Russia and America, the two largest grain exporting countries in the world, of the sterility arising in the wheat lands from the export of grain for the supply of the British cities. It is really a most exhaustive process; it is bad political economy, and worse political morality. There was a deep morality in the laws which induced every state to encourage the growth of sufficient corn on its own |